Afterburn

PROLOGUE

Office of the Commander, Black Sea Fleet Sevastopol Naval Base, Crimean Military District Vitse-Admiral Nikolai Sergeivich Dmitriev looked up from his desk as his aide slipped into the office without knocking. The young Starshiy-leytenant looked tired, drawn, like a man who hadn’t slept for a week. That might well have been true, Dmitriev reflected as he studied the man. There weren’t many loyalists left with the Black Sea Fleet these days, and the officers who had stayed at their posts were all working double and triple shifts to try to keep the fleet in something approaching a state of readiness.

A losing cause, Dmitriev thought bitterly. Transfers, desertions, and outright mutinies had left the Black Sea Fleet crippled.

“Comrade Admiral,” Starshiy-Leytenant Anton Ivanovich Kulagin said formally. “There is word from the Krimsky Komsomolets. The American battle group is entering the Dardanelles.”

Dmitriev looked away. “So it has finally happened,” he said quietly, not bothering to hide his own fatigue. Even though he’d expected the news, the confirmation was bitter medicine indeed, confirmation that the Motherland had fallen yet another notch in power and prestige. An American aircraft carrier battle group would soon sail where no such force had ever sailed before, in the waters of the Black Sea.

Once, the Chemoje More had been a Russian lake. Not even the Nazis had placed a fleet of any importance in those waters. To find a comparable time in history would require looking back a century and a half, to the days when British, French, and Turkish invaders had besieged Sevastopol in the Crimean War.

It was the end of an era. The West might have proclaimed that the Rodina was no longer a superpower after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, and the end of Lenin’s Soviet Union, but this was the final, the undeniable proof of the fact, when the Motherland could no longer even defend these waters that had for so long been her own.

“Is the submarine maintaining contact with the Americans?” he asked slowly.

The aide nodded. “Yes, Comrade Vice-Admiral. The Americans have been carrying out their routine antisubmarine operations, of course, but there has been no indication that the Krimsky Komsomolets has been detected. His captain is more concerned that the Turks may detect the sub if he moves into the straits behind the Americans.”

“Not a serious problem, I think. The Turks are staying quite neutral these days. The political situation between Greece and Turkey is still somewhat, ah, strained. And that has had serious repercussions for the Americans.”

Kulagin sniffed disdainfully. “They might have blocked passage,” he said. “Denied the Americans the right to sail through their waters.”

“Turkey plays a careful game. They do not wish to cooperate with those they believe to be allies of the Greeks, but they will not defy the United Nations. Wheels within wheels within wheels, Anton Ivanovich.” He held up his hands and shifted them rapidly back and forth, as though juggling many precariously balanced objects. “The UN passes resolutions concerning Armenia and Georgia, then asks the United States to help enforce them. Turkey denies the Americans the right to base aircraft on their soil, partly because they still dislike American policies in Greece, but also because allowing it would further inflame Turkish Moslem fundamentalists. However, the Turks agree to the passage of the carrier through their territorial waters because if they do not, the UN may not see their point of view when it comes time to discuss the way the Turks have been handling their ethnic Armenian problem. Still, I doubt they will share information or assist the Americans in any way, so long as we do not force them to choose sides.”

“Doesn’t that rob us of our best chance to stop the Americans, Comrade Vice-Admiral?” Kulagin’s eyes flashed. “They are vulnerable as they move through the straits.” He moved his hands together, defining a narrow space. “Concentrated…”

“If our leaders were willing to authorize a nuclear strike against an American fleet in Turkish territory, perhaps.” Dmitriev shook his head wearily. “Short of that, we cannot challenge them.”

“But surely a strike with conventional forces, Comrade Vice-Admiral-“

Dmitriev sighed and got up from behind his desk, moving to the window overlooking the historic harbor beyond the waterfront below. Once, Sevastopol had been one of the Soviet Union’s thriving ports, filled with commercial shipping and the naval might of a superpower. Though the harbor might now have seemed crowded to the untrained eye, Dmitriev knew better.

His eyes lingered on the imposing bulk of the Pobedonosnyy Rodina, the largest ship in the harbor. The sight of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier brought back mixed memories for Dmitriev, fond and bitter. Just a few years before, he’d commanded a Russian naval squadron built around another carrier, the Kreml, working together with an American carrier battle group to keep India and Pakistan from escalating a conventional conflict into a full-fledged nuclear exchange. Ah, those had been heady days, back when Russians could still hold their heads high and proclaim that they, too, were a superpower, despite anything the West might say.

But those days were gone now. Pobedonosnyy Rodina was the only aircraft carrier still afloat out of the three commissioned with the old fleet, and the rest of the Motherland’s naval power had shrunk proportionately. Dmitriev had been rewarded for his loyalty to Krasilnikov with this promotion to command of the entire Black Sea Fleet.

An empty reward. An empty fleet, impressive on paper, but rusting to scrap as he watched, with few men left to man the few ships that could still put to sea… and with a homeland that was tearing itself apart in blood and bitterness.

His country was dying.

He gestured for Kulagin to join him by the window. “Even if we were willing to add to the list of our enemies by mining or launching an attack in Turkish waters, it would be a futile attempt. Look out there, Anton Ivanovich. What do you see?”

“I see… the harbor. The fleet.” Kulagin sounded baffled.

“The fleet. The Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. During the Cold War we maintained nearly two hundred warships and submarines of all sizes in these waters, plus four hundred aircraft, and that was just our naval force. Now we control what you see out there, plus the handful at Balaklava and Kerch. Less than fifty ships still seaworthy, all told, and I doubt we have the trained men to man more than two-thirds of those. Our air arm has been reduced even more, and the Army would be fortunate to muster two full divisions in all the Crimea. We could attack the American battle group, perhaps even cause some damage, but all that would do is bring down the full weight of the West on us … again, as in the Kola. It is over, Kulagin. Our leaders have betrayed us, and we can no longer hope to hold back the tide.”

The Rodina was dying.

First had come the collapse of the old Soviet Union after Gorbachev had withdrawn from Europe and lost control of the reforms he’d tried to put in place to minimize the damage from a failing economy. Yeltsin had done little better than Gorbachev, allowing the Soviet Republics to go their own way, making a series of fatal compromises with the West, letting the economy continue its relentless slide into the gutter. Hard-liners, old Communists and right-wing Nationalists united by their visions of restoring order, had ousted Yeltsin in due course, bringing in a figurehead ruler in the Gorbachev mold to head the revived Soviet Union. But that compromise regime hadn’t been able to stabilize things either, and the real leaders of the new Union had turned to the one sure way of changing the balance of power… war.

Dmitriev wasn’t privy to the machinations inside the Kremlin, but he suspected that the assassination of the Union’s president in Norway had been an inside job, planned and executed by the KGB or perhaps the GRU. Within hours the tanks had started rolling across the frozen border between Russia’s Kola Peninsula and Norway, supposedly in retaliation for the plot and to “restore order” in a dangerous neighbor. It might have worked, too; it had worked as a means of bringing the breakaway republic of Ukraine back inside the Soviet fold, at least temporarily. Certainly, the West had been slow to react, unwilling, perhaps, to see danger in a Soviet Union that everyone believed was already dead. The Norwegian gambit might have left the new Union poised to dominate a confused and irresolute Europe… until the Americans had thwarted the plan. Their aircraft carrier Jefferson, the same ship Dmitriev had cooperated with in the Indian Ocean, had crippled the Soviet naval forces off Norway and opened the way for a full-scale Western intervention. In the process both Kreml and Soyuz, two-thirds of the Union’s available carrier force, had been lost in battle, the most devastating upset of naval power since the destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet at Midway.

Dmitriev turned away from the window, more discouraged than ever. That gamble in Norway had been the final blow to the Motherland. A populist leader named Leonov had seized control from the discredited hard-liners, but it was too late for a political solution to Russia’s problems. Soon Leonov’s Popular Democratic Front, the “Blues,” had been locked in combat with Marshal Krasilnikov’s hard-line “Reds” in an all-out civil war. As the revived Union had started to disintegrate, the Americans had intervened in the far north, seizing key military facilities in the Kola Peninsula. They’d claimed that Krasilnikov was planning to use submarine-launched nukes to blackmail Leonov into submission, though Dmitriev was convinced that their real intent had been to guarantee the success of Leonov and his anti-Communists. The Americans had a long history of anti-Communist sentiments.

The Kola Intervention, in fact, was the second time the West had put their troops on the soil of Holy Mother Russia in this century. The first had been in 1919, when they and a small international force had occupied Murmansk, Archanglsk, and Vladivostok in opposition to Lenin and the Revolution. Few outside of Russia remembered that particular chapter of history now, but the Russians had long memories.

And now that same American carrier, Jefferson, was leading a battle group through the Dardanelles and into the Black Sea. It would have been… satisfying to strike back, to smash this insult to Russian sovereignty, to Russian honor, but Dmitriev lacked the military strength to oppose them. The Red Banner Black Sea Fleet had been too hard-hit by defections and neglect to defend the coasts of the Rodina herself. Dmitriev’s first duty was to preserve the fleet for the coming struggle with Ukraine.

As much as Dmitriev would have liked to bloody the Americans for their invasion of the Kola, he was a realist. The American presence in the Black Sea was almost certainly an artifact of the constantly churning politics between the United States and the United Nations, an unpleasant fact that might be wiped away by the stroke of a diplomat’s pen tomorrow. The Ukraine was a more constant problem, one that was not so likely to simply go away.

Ukraine had never been wholly comfortable with its role as one of the largest and most productive republics of the Union. Ethnic Ukrainians were not Russians, whatever most outsiders might think. They had their own language, their own culture, and a history of independence extending back for centuries. Great Russians still remembered, with the same loving attention to historical detail that recalled the foreign intervention in the Kola in 1919, that millions of Ukrainians had actually welcomed the Hitlerite legions as liberators in the Great Patriotic War.

Now those same Ukrainians were taking advantage of the Russian Civil War to strengthen their own position ― especially in the Crimea.

Geographically, the Crimean Peninsula had always been considered a part of the Ukraine, which extended across the mainland to the north; the Russian Federation bordered the peninsula only to the east, across the narrow Straits of Kerch and on the far side of the Sea of Azov. Politically and militarily, however ― which was to say practically ― it had always belonged to Russia, who’d seen the peninsula’s strategic naval value as far back as the early 1800s when the czars were still fighting the Turks.

And then, in the 1950s, Nikita Kruschev had formally and officially returned Crimea to Ukraine in a gesture of international goodwill and fellowship. At the time, the gesture had been just that, a gesture, a public relations gimmick, as an American capitalist might say… and meaningless in the realities of internal Soviet politics.

Now, though, with Russia unable to defend herself on a hundred crumbling fronts, Kruschev’s goodwill had become a major problem, an invitation to the Ukrainians to settle old scores and to enrich themselves at Mother Russia’s expense.

Not that they needed the encouragement, Dmitriev thought wryly. They would soon be turning their attentions southward. The Ukrainian army was strong and well-equipped, and they controlled more than half of the old Black Sea Fleet. They were the real threat, not the Americans.

But how could he explain all of that to Kulagin? The young aide had been raised and educated during the seventies and eighties, when the West had been the enemy that threatened the Soviet Union, and the breakaway republics and states were tools or dupes of Western adventurism, a clear case of black and white, of good and evil. Though Dmitriev had grown up with all the indoctrination of the Cold War era teaching him those same lessons, he knew from long experience that a broader interpretation was necessary. The forces of political and economic freedom unleashed by Gorbachev didn’t need Western villains to make them dangerous. The genie could never be put back in the bottle.

“No, Anton Ivanovich,” he said again after a long and thoughtful silence.

“We cannot stop the Americans. And I wonder if we really want to, after all. The West may find that intervention here is far more difficult and costly than they ever imagined possible.” He paused, his eyes still lingering on the nuclear carrier out in the harbor that might never venture out of port again. “I do not envy these Americans. They may find that the Rodina in ruins is a far more dangerous enemy than she ever was when she stood proudly in strength and union.”

Dmitriev turned away from the window and gave a gesture of dismissal. He felt weary, discouraged… a tired man who faced impossible odds. Still, he could not give in to his fatigue or his ebbing morale. There was still a job to be done here, and he could not let self-pity or weariness stand in his way.

Nikolai Sergeivich Dmitriev knew his duty, to the Rodina.

And to honor.